


Alive

by yuletide_archivist



Category: Rules (Manga)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-12-20
Updated: 2007-12-20
Packaged: 2018-01-25 02:16:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,168
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1626254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tooru learning to cope. Sorry if it has less smut if you hoped.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Alive

**Author's Note:**

> It's been an honour writing for you. I wouldn't have a chance to love "Rules" without your efforts
> 
> Written for Ashcat

 

 

For a while after Matsuoka-sempai had died Tooru was thinking of killing himself. Only it took some energy, some defiance, some will to do it, and Tooru had none at the time. Sempai wouldn't have wanted him to. All Tooru could do was stare at the wall, he barely made himself get up to go to the toilet, barely remembered to eat and drink. Perhaps, he hoped, it could just happen without his conscious effort.

Or maybe he did commit suicide and simply didn't notice it. Especially often Tooru thinks that just before going to the Unicorn bar. It's best when the client is particularly good or quite awful - doesn't matter which, really. Pleasure, pain, or fear - he needs any sensation strong enough to awaken him a tiny bit, to arouse a sting inside, to make his body scream: "I'm alive!"

After that he is able to go on for another couple of days or even weeks. He sometimes drinks himself into oblivion, but he is wary of drugs. He knows the pattern: the other boys from the bar give him plenty of opportunity to watch it; now Tooru sometimes thinks he recognizes it in his own behaviour. His body responds infallibly, but his soul needs stronger and stronger stimulation, more often, more violently. He finds himself with clients he would have avoided out of self-preservation a few months earlier. The nicer customers he is more often rude to these days.

But it's not always like this, he tells himself. Maybe those are just passing whims. After all, with Hikaru-san he feels different. A bit of desire, a bit of resentment, a bit of jealousy, and at the base of it all a warm, comfortable feeling, more suited towards a family member, not an unlikely lover.   
Hikaru falling for Yuki still bugs him. He'd learned to face that Hikaru will never accept him as he is, but choosing Yuki who is so much bleaker and weaker, even whose troubles are ten times diluted compared to Tooru's, makes him offended and miserable, but that is nothing like the bottomless despair of the other loss. It's even something of a diversion. Almost as if Tooru were just like everyone else.

Sometimes Tooru buys a newspaper at the station in an effort to feel a part of the human mass. He reads through the jokes and the horoscopes, tries to solve the puzzle but usually doesn't have patience for it. He has learned to appreciate humour, but however hard he tries he can't make himself laugh - and yet when he mocks people or plays at innocence by a client's silent request, laughing seems the easiest thing to feign.

He doesn't remember if this reading was cause or effect of what happened that winter.

He'd had that client once before, and that was practically all he remembered about him - must have been drunk. Or it had been soon after he'd learned about sempai. Tooru didn't feel like trying to recall. Anyway, he must have pleased him, for the man seemed genuinely glad to see him.

While Tooru was getting dressed, involuntary shivers down his spine reminding him he was being watched, the man was lying in bed, smoking, holding the cigarette stub so that the fire almost reached his shortish, thick fingers. He was going on and on about his upcoming birthday and having nobody to share a holiday with, about the places he was planning to go to; yes, he was a talkative type, Tooru remembered now. He simply filtered the client's talk out of his consciousness, until something triggered his attention.

His horoscope for the day had told him that North was an extremely favourable direction - that made him decide, and in a few hours he found himself on a plane, going on a sightseeing trip to Hokkaido.

Upon landing, he dropped one of his classmates a message saying he would be out of town for a few days. He didn't really know why he bothered taking his phone with him at all, everyone was used to his disappearances anyway. The next day he and Tadashi - that was the client's name, strangely appropriate, as he decided later - found themselves in a small ryokan in the mountains, cut off from civilisation by a minor snowslide that broke off the phone lines.

They were the only guests and had the onsen all to themselves. Tooru had no idea if their week's stay there was an emergency or had been planned all along and he never bothered to ask. Tadashi, to his surprise, talked little and touched him even less, the owner vas virtually invisible, so Tooru was spending his days watching the snow: the snow lying below, the snow blazing above, the snow falling gently, the snow swirling menacingly; from the porch, out the window, from the hot water. When it came to the obligatory sex in the evenings his mind was usually so packed with snow that the blankness claimed him sometime in the middle; Tadashi wasn't an outstanding lover, Tooru himself felt a lot like a rag doll. Sometimes he thought that the most satisfying part of their bedtime activities was the other man rubbing his heels - and the strangest thing was that the latter seemed to be of the same mind.

He hadn't felt so peaceful for a long time. It was like getting into a pocket of universe where different rules applied and were what happened in the big world had no meaning. And all this time inside Tooru was a small voice; not a scream this time, but whisper: "I'm alive, don't count me out yet."

When they returned Tadashi thanked him for having been a perfect travel companion and gave him his business card. He even made sure that he had Tooru's right number, by calling him at once, having him at the same time store his own name in his phone's memory. He said that Tooru was welcome to call at any time and hinted at a permanent relationship.

Tooru followed him with a polite smile gradually fading. He had needed that respite, but now everything was returning back to normal, and the man had turned again into a client, a rather bothersome one. He had no intention to contact him again.

Tadashi never phoned either. Once Tooru saw him again near the bar, saw him meet his eyes for a moment and quickly turn away. That suited him just fine; that even felt somehow proper. Tooru doesn't recall that journey much anyway.

***  
Today Tooru is thinking of Atori, but things keep distracting him. A gust of warm wind on his cheek, a fragment of music from an open door of a shop, too bright red flowers on a flower stall. It is as if a dusty blanket that was covering him from head to toe has been lifted. And he thinks, "How good to be alive." And then he remembers Atori running away. "I'm alive," it is. And that means "I can hurt," too.

 


End file.
